When was the last time you were genuinely happy?

You may be a fortunate soul who has no trouble answering this question. You may have led a charmed existence free from trouble, or you may be a natural Zen master, who suffers like everyone else but lets those pains roll off leaving without a mark.

Or it may require some thought. You may have happy memories in the past, but they’ve grown misty with time. It may take an effort of will to recall them.

Or this may be a difficult question. Your life may be scarred by regret. You might strain to recall even an instant of joy.

Either way, I’d suggest that if your life is lacking, you schedule more happiness into it.

It sounds absurd, because you can’t conjure emotions into existence by willpower. But what you can do is create the conditions for happiness. If you put yourself in the right circumstances, the emotion often follows.

We all know this works in the opposite direction. If I’m tired or hungry or stressed, a minor inconvenience can put me in a bad mood. Our emotions are more dictated by circumstance than we might realize. You can use this to make yourself happier as well.

It doesn’t have to be a peak experience. It can be a simple thing that brings you joy: a party with music, a neighborhood cookout, a gathering with friends or family, a walk in nature, an afternoon in a coffee shop with a good book.

Only you can decide what holds meaning for you. But whatever it is, you should make a deliberate effort to have more of it in your life. Happiness will only come if you leave a space for it to show up.

Happiness is what we should be fighting for

In my view, happiness is the only thing a moral system can sensibly be based on. If you accuse me of being a utilitarian, I’ll gladly plead guilty to the charge.

The alternative to utilitarianism is a morality that’s based on either virtues or rules. You can hold up martial courage, or adherence to tradition, or obedience to duty, or honoring your elders, or religious faith, or any of a thousand other qualities as the supreme guiding principle of life.

However, those moral systems all fall short because they have no explanation for why we should prefer one rule, or one virtue, over a different one. Why tradition, rather than innovation? Why sobriety, rather than hedonism? Why the family rather than the state, or vice versa? Why one church rather than another? If there’s no answer to the “why”, all these choices are ultimately arbitrary.

By contrast, when happiness – or well-being, or flourishing, or whatever you choose to call it – is the key to your morality, you have a guide for how to choose among priorities. You go by what produces the best outcome for human beings, rather than maximizing some impersonal measure of goodness, like getting the high score in a video game.

That doesn’t mean morality is always easy. People can argue (and do, at length) over what the rules should be, when we should hold firm and when we should make exceptions. It will always be difficult to judge between mutually exclusive claims. But if we agree on what the goal is, and if we agree that arguments have to be based on evidence that everyone can see for themselves, it is possible to reach consensus. The expanding circle of moral progress across history testifies to this.

However, a utilitarian philosophy comes with an important asterisk. That’s that we have, in a sense, a duty to be happy. If happiness is the desired state for everyone, doesn’t that mean we should try to nurture it in our own lives?

A duty to be happy

In a society built on capitalism, it can be hard to make time for happiness. Our jobs tend to demand everything we’re able to give and then some. Even among those of us who don’t have bosses to report to, there’s the insidious “hustle culture” mentality that we should devote every waking moment to “productive” (read: money-making) pursuits.

There’s also a political angle to unhappiness. In my experience, where conservatives are prone to disastrous overconfidence, atheists and progressives are habitually gloomy and downbeat. That’s because we look at the world and imagine how it could be, and reality comes up short by comparison.

We dream of a world without violence, exploitation, or suffering. Yet those evils persist, and often it seems like they’re multiplying. We hope for change, but those hopes have so often been dashed – whether because the powers that be strangled reform in its cradle, or because people were kept divided and powerless by their worse impulses of bigotry, ignorance and greed.

When fascism and climate change are knocking at the door, it can seem like the only moral response is to redouble your activism. But if the struggle demands all we have, then leisure and happiness can seem like luxuries you can’t afford. At best, they seem like inexcusable selfishness; at worst, a betrayal of your comrades. Some leftists act as if we have a positive duty to be discontented, the better to motivate us toward rejecting the present order and creating a better one. When the world is so bad, how can you be happy, unless you don’t care?

However, I see a problem with this outlook. If we have it so bad, what about previous generations, who lived in even worse poverty with even fewer rights?

When should past generations have been happy?

What if you were born a medieval peasant, legally bound to a feudal lord, in a rigidly stratified society ruled by kings and churches? The common people in those times had none of the rights we take for granted, and starvation was rarely more than a bad harvest away. Or what if you were born into a Jewish family in that same era, when the entire Christian world was viciously antisemitic?

What if you were born a woman, in any of the patriarchal societies of the past and some that still exist today, that grant women far fewer rights and freedoms than men? Or what if you were a Black person in America in almost any era of the past – or for that matter, America today? (If you’re not American, you can substitute whatever minority is in disfavor in your country.)

What would we say to people born in those repressive, unenlightened times? Was it their duty to be miserable their entire lives, hoping that the far future would be better? Or did those generations have a right to find happiness where they could get it?

To my mind, any morality which claims that happiness is an unaffordable luxury isn’t worth advocating for. It’s a morality that, literally, offers us nothing. No one should be expected to sacrifice their entire life for the sake of others – not a capitalist ruling class, and not their descendants in the distant and uncertain future.

As much as struggle is necessary, you can’t build your entire life around it. We need to make room for joy.

We have to work, and we should fight for a better world. But life can’t be all duty and work and obligation. We also need time and space for ourselves. We need music and art, we need love and beauty, we need rest and celebration. Our lives should partake of all the colors in the palette.